“People do laugh a lot when I tell them my name,” says Mary, of Willoughby, Hull. “But you get used to it after a few years.”

Mary’s name turned festive when she met and married Leeroy Christmas in 1986.

“It never struck me what would happen to my name if we got married,” says Mary. “But Leeroy was well aware.”

Leeroy, a 47-year-old postman, says: “It was actually a running joke between me and my mum Valerie that it would be very funny if I married someone with the name Mary.

“But neither of us thought it would actually happen. Everything happened so fast – we got married five months after we met and before we knew it she was a Mary Christmas.”

prank

The couple – who have two children, James, 19, and Elouise, 22 – have received so many prank calls that they have asked British Telecom to bar any incoming withheld numbers.

“At first I found it funny,” says Mary. “People would ring up asking to speak to Father Christmas and I’d say, ‘He’s out with the reindeers, all right?’

“But in the end we decided enough was enough and put a bar on the calls.”

And her unusual name has caused her intense embarrassment many times.

“I’m disabled and went for an appointment at the Hull Royal Infirmary hospital,” she recalls. “When they read my name out in the waiting room everyone burst out laughing.

“I made a beeline out of the room as quick as I could.”

But the biggest problem Mary faces now is transport.

“Can you imagine what happens when I try to book a taxi?” she says. “Nine times out of 10 they don’t turn up. And if I ring to complain they hang up, assuming I’m a prank caller.”

Booking a table is a joke

They both work at Tesco – but Mary McCarthy had no idea what was in store when she first went out with Paul Christmas.

“He works on the dairy section and I was on the deli counter and I kept seeing him when I went out with my mates,” says Mary, 43, from Gorseinon, Swansea.

“It was only when he asked me to go out with him that I found out his full name. This was 18 years ago, and I wasn’t even thinking about getting married at the time, so it didn’t cross my mind I could end up being a Mary Christmas.” But inevitably, when they tied the knot 12 years ago, the jokes began.

“Beforehand my girlfriends kept on saying to me, ‘There’s no way you’re going to marry him. You’ll be a Mary Christmas!’,” she says. “But once he proposed it didn’t bother me what name I had as I love him. When we set a date for the wedding the wisecracks started at work. They’d say, ‘You’re going to be a very Mary Christmas next year!’” And since we’ve been married I get people pointing at me in the shop and shouting Mary Christmas, especially at this time of year. It’s a laugh.”

The only snag is booking a table at a restaurant. “I’ve had a situation where I booked a table for 20 under my name. But they thought it was a joke so when we arrived we couldn’t have our dinner. So now I always book under my maiden name.”

Some genealogists say the surname derives simply from “one born at Christmas” and it could hail from France. Amateur Henry Christmas said: “The original spelling was ‘Chrystmasse’, indicating Norman origin. And Huguenots also came from France with the name.”

It gets people talking

It's a wintry kind of name – and Mary Christmas, 81, reckons it helps break the ice with strangers.

“It starts conversations that you would never normally have if you had an ordinary name,” says Mary, from West Hagley, near Stourbridge, West Midlands.

“It always gets a smile when people look at your name on your credit card or see it printed on tickets at the airport.

“You give people a laugh and you have a nice chat about how you ended up with this name.”

She married engineer Robert Christmas, who died 22 years ago, in 1954 – but she did not know his surname when they started dating.

“I only knew him as Robert at first,” she says. “We were partners at the ice skating rink in Birmingham. One evening he was taking ages to get changed and I said to him, ‘Goodness me, you’re taking so long that I’ll be waiting for Christmas’.

“He just smiled, and later on I realised why.”

Mary, who has a son David, 50, says that in the 60s – before they went ex-directory – they received hundreds of calls from children around Christmas time.

The kids genuinely believed they were phoning Father Christmas and Mary recalls: “We used to get so many callers it was hard for anyone else to reach us.

“It was very sweet because Robert used to put on this booming voice and answer the phone saying he was Santa Claus.